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“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink…”— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798, in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”The reality confronting millions of Californians as they cope with yet another lengthy episode in a seemingly endless series of droughts is that — like Coleridge’s mariner — this state has billions of acre-feet of water clearly visible every day in the form of the Pacific Ocean and its many bays...

Columns

Sometimes it can take more than a decade for a completely sensible idea to catch on. So it is with what may be the single best money-saving idea in last year’s state budget, one that is just now beginning fully to take hold.The idea, part of a plan by Gov. Jerry Brown to appease a panel of federal judges demanding ever more releases of state prison inmates, calls for the possible parole of several hundred convicts who are chronically sick or mentally impaired, plus a new parole...

Columns

It was supposed to be a $5 billion project, creating 6,500 jobs. That was the hype when Tesla Motors last summer orchestrated a five-state battle to host a huge “gigafactory” where it plans to build batteries for its next generation of electric cars.Anyone who’s driven one knows the Tesla Model S seems to take off like a bullet from a standing start, pushing driver and passengers back into their seats with strong G-forces.But the only bullet involved with...

Columns

It’s now possible that mid-February will be remembered for years to come as a fateful time in the century-long history of the California Public Utilities Commission. That’s when, without offering any legal justification, the five commissioners spent public money to hire a criminal lawyer.If courts find this move was as blatantly illegal as it looks to some, they may soon cease treating this powerful but disgraced body that sets power and natural prices for most...

Columns

It’s beginning to look like the hosannas that greeted California’s first-ever groundwater regulation law were a tad premature when it passed late last summer.For after a tantalizing winter of heavy rains but insufficient snowfall to dent the state’s four-year drought, confusion over the groundwater rules has begun to set in.One thing for sure: The rain and snow of the just-concluding winter have not been nearly enough to begin recharging California’s...

Columns

Consider the criminal history of Bobby Beausoleil, 67, the latest follower of Charles Manson to come up for an automatic parole hearing.Among the lesser-known members of the murderous so-called Manson “Family,” Beausoleil was a Manson henchman who fled Los Angeles after the 1969 murders of musician Gary Hinman and movie stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea. Caught near San Luis Obispo and jailed, he could not participate in the group’s notorious slayings of...

Columns

California attorney general’s agents wasted no time after this column in late January called for a criminal investigation of the former state Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey. Less than five days later, investigators executed a search warrant at Peevey’s primary home in La Canada Flintridge.But the scope of the investigation might not be broad enough.Egregious as his alleged acts have been, Peevey could not have acted alone in securing...

Columns

If voters get annoyed and sick of seeing paid petition circulators outside their favorite big box stores during the next 15 months, they will have only themselves to blame.Low voter turnout is one big reason to expect a larger-than-ever proliferation of ballot initiatives looking to share the fall 2016 ballot with presidential and U.S. Senate candidates. If you didn’t vote last year, you’re part of the reason for any upcoming initiative annoyances.As usual, it...

Columns

Green cards for spouses — that’s the latest quiet Obama administration move to please and appease the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who constantly clamor for more H1-B visas to bring in cheap, skilled foreign labor.The ploy sounds extremely humanitarian, but might really be little more than an end run around the current limit of 85,000 visas granted to immigrants whose skills are allegedly not matched by any talent available in America, including...

Columns

References to trade agreements were some of the very few passages during President Obama’s State of the Union speech that moved Republicans to stand and applaud along with Obama’s Democratic Party allies.And when Obama talks about trade bills pending in Congress, the biggest is a plan to give the president fast-track authority to move forward with the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, America’s newest putative free trade agreement.Because of its...